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Pyrolave making-of

90% CGI – 10% Post Production

client: PYROLAVE – agency: DPARED – art director: CHRISTELLE MANGIN

Pixteur was approached by a local agency to produce an advertising image for a local company called Pyrolave. The brief was simple; modern kitchen island with the clients red pyrolave countertop in prominent view, lava volcanos and a exaggerated semi eclipse. Easy… Well the countertop was too expensive to produce for a shoot, and they wanted a brief animation for the website. Also the background was supposed to depict a real landscape in France where the lava stone is actually extracted from extinct volcanos… and no usable photography existed! Ok so not so easy!

pixteur decided early on to go full CGI on this one. The landscape was build from various satellite data sources and DEM files were used to create the elevation according to real world measurements. This base mesh was hand sculpted in zbrush for a little extra detail. We used the best color satellite imagery we could find on top of which we scattered various species of 3D trees. That gave a much greater sense of realisme and detail to the landscape.

The foreground lava base mesh was made in MODO and then sculpted in zbrush to add all the fine details. We 3D modeled the tile floor, the kitchen island, pyrolave countertop and faucet. All the little stones and pebbles were done using MODO’s replicators. We textured as much as we could with MODO’s lovely texture bombing workflow.

We also knew we needed a 3D sky to encompass the scene and we were looking for a time-lapse effect. So we used the Ozone plugin for Maya and an Alembic version of our MODO scene to render out a matched camera move of the background plate and a 360° HDR of the virtual sky for each frame of the animation. We brought that all into MODO, lit our scene and rendered our stills and the animation.

Post production was done in photoshop leveraging 32 bit render passes for a little extra oomph. We did the post on the animation with after effects.